How Brands Should Engage in the Participation Age: Suzie Reider YouTube’s Keynote

In the interest of keeping valuable information accessible in this day and age, we decided that we would offer videos of each panel of the 2013 Video Marketing Summit to the public. We know many of you couldn’t make it out here, and we know that there is inherent value in coming to such a Summit live: the networking possibilities, the ability to ask questions of professionals in the field, hanging out in San Francisco, etc. The event was a great success and it was due to a number of factors, including landing great guests like Suzie Reider, Director of Media Solutions at Google and Director Global Industry Development at YouTube, who was our opening keynote speaker. The following video is that very keynote.

Suzie Reider, Opening Keynote: The Participation Age

Some highlights:

Reider lays out what she calls “The Participation Age,” and marketing to the generation known as “Generation C,” which is not a “demographic” as much as it is a “psychographic.” In other words, it’s not an age group, it’s a mindset, a lifestyle.

Four C’s help make up Gen-C:

Curation

Creation

Connection:

Community

When you aim for this audience, you “future-proof” your business. Reider says,

“In 7 years, Gen-C is going to make up 75 percent of the workforce. 40 percent of the entire population will be Gen-C.”

The model for reaching an audience has been: try to find as many people as possible and market to them, in this oft-seen funnel:

But with online video, the idea is to find key people first, who then spread the word to build an audience, so the funnel gets turned on its head:

So how are we reaching this audience? There are four things to consider:

Audience: let them find you

Expression: create content and not traditional ads

Participation: get involved and start a conversation

Signals: launch, listen, and learn

Reider also mentions a study taking 10 top CPG companies showing that 53 percent of their customers were not a part of the target demographic. So this goes a long way to back up the “let the audience find you” idea.

Then she starts talking about TrueView and how she believes that user choice is the wave of the future in video advertising. People remember ads that they choose to watch, especially if they are made for content and not traditional advertising.

We get to see a bunch of examples of “content, not commercials,” when we are shown ads such as Pepsi’s Jeff Gordon prank and Kmart’s “Ship My Pants.” The freedom of the internet has allowed these ads to thrive, taking risks you can’t see on television.

Suzie also cites a statistic that says 25 percent of all the search results from the world’s top 20 brands are links to user-generated content, which shows the power of participation. Reider cites a quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” It’s a great quote, one that brands can utilize when they see user-generated content about their company on YouTube.

GoPro is given as a great example of this–GoPro’s own commercials show what their product can do, then they have tons of advocates who shoot video with a GoPro, which further advertises the brand. In a YouTube GoPro study, GoPro refers to themselves as a “media company,” which is sort of the direction I personally believe brands, no matter what they sell, are slowly gravitating towards. They are in the business of not only selling cameras, but creating content.